World – WNDhttp://www.wnd.com
A Free Press For A Free People Since 1997Tue, 26 Sep 2017 22:03:27 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6Border-wall construction beginshttp://www.wnd.com/2017/09/border-wall-construction-begins/
http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/border-wall-construction-begins/#respondTue, 26 Sep 2017 21:17:48 +0000http://wp.wnd.com/?p=4616955(WASHINGTON TIMES) — Homeland Security said it began construction Tuesday on the prototypes for President Trump’s new border wall.

In a short notice, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the building began in San Diego on eight prototypes, which had been awarded over the summer.

Four of the prototypes are concrete walls, and four are non-concrete designs.

Trump told reporters Sunday that he has “never heard” of a potential deal with Assange.

“I think the president’s answer indicates that there is a wall around him that is being created by people who do not want to expose this fraud that there was collusion between our intelligence community and the leaders of the Democratic Party,” Rohrabacher told The Daily Caller Tuesday in a phone interview.

The Gulf nation had been the only one in the region to forbid female drivers. Under the policy change, women will be able to operate motor vehicles beginning next June, Saudi officials said in an announcement on state television and in a simultaneous media event in Washington.

Saudi Arabia, which is the birthplace of Islam, operates under Shariah law. The nation’s Muslim clerics have continually defended the practice of banning women drivers.

]]>http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/saudi-arabia-lifts-ban-on-women-drivers/feed/0Mueller sets interviews with White House staffhttp://www.wnd.com/2017/09/mueller-sets-interviews-with-white-house-staff/
http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/mueller-sets-interviews-with-white-house-staff/#respondTue, 26 Sep 2017 19:33:44 +0000http://wp.wnd.com/?p=4616882(CNN) — Special counsel investigators could start interviewing current and former White House staff as soon as later this week regarding the Russian probe, two sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

One source cautioned it is still being worked out with Robert Mueller’s office and said it might be delayed until next week.

As CNN previously reported, among the people Mueller has expressed interest in speaking with are former and current White House staffers whom investigators consider witnesses, including former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former press secretary Sean Spicer, communications director Hope Hicks, White House counsel Don McGahn, communications adviser Josh Raffel and associate counsel James Burnham.

]]>http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/mueller-sets-interviews-with-white-house-staff/feed/0Hillary lets loose: Compares Trump to Putinhttp://www.wnd.com/2017/09/hillary-lets-loose-compares-trump-to-putin/
http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/hillary-lets-loose-compares-trump-to-putin/#respondTue, 26 Sep 2017 18:36:26 +0000http://wp.wnd.com/?p=4616848(FREE BEACON) — Hillary Clinton said Monday on Bloomberg News that President Donald Trump has “tendencies toward authoritarianism,” adding that she hopes he has not “ordered the killing of people and journalists” as Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of doing.

During a conversation with Charlie Rose, she compared Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose relationship with Trump has particularly drawn scrutiny from Democrats and the media. Clinton discussed her ideas on Trump’s view of democracy, saying she “hopes” the president is not exactly like Putin in every way.

“I don’t think he really values democracy, Charlie,” Clinton said.

]]>http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/hillary-lets-loose-compares-trump-to-putin/feed/0Witch doctors sacrifice children in parched countryhttp://www.wnd.com/2017/09/witch-doctors-sacrifice-children-in-parched-country/
http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/witch-doctors-sacrifice-children-in-parched-country/#respondTue, 26 Sep 2017 17:37:19 +0000http://wp.wnd.com/?p=4616810(RELIGION NEWS SERVICE) — KATABI, Uganda — Jackline Mukisa sobbed as she described how her 8-year-old son was found in a nearby swamp in February without teeth, lips, ears and genitals.

“My innocent son died a painful death,” said Mukisa, 28. “How could somebody intend to murder my son?”

A motorcyclist offered John Lubega a lift as he walked back from school, according to fellow students who saw him last. His remains suggest he was slowly killed as part of a human sacrifice ritual performed by witch doctors, apparently to appease the spirits, said Mukisa, who filed a police report.

]]>http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/witch-doctors-sacrifice-children-in-parched-country/feed/0Warmbier's parents: N. Korea 'terrorists'http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/n-korea-not-a-victim-they-are-terrorists/
http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/n-korea-not-a-victim-they-are-terrorists/#respondTue, 26 Sep 2017 17:15:38 +0000http://wp.wnd.com/?p=4616800(FOX NEWS) The first time Otto Warmbier’s parents saw their son after he was flown back from North Korea in June, they were confronted with the sound of inhuman howling so terrifying Otto’s mom ran off the plane.

As they waited for the plane bringing him back to Ohio, Otto’s parents, Fred and Cindy, had held on to hope that with medical care in the United States, he would eventually get better. That optimism didn’t last long.

They instead saw the reality of torture at the hands of Kim Jong Un’s brutal regime: their son was now blind and deaf, with mangled teeth, jerking violently and moaning on a stretcher with a feeding tube coming out of his nose.

The widely publicized, theologically dense letter was delivered to the Pope with 40 signatures on August 11, according to its organizers. It has since gained 22 more signatures and was released to the public on Saturday. In a press release, the organizers say they speak for “a large number” of clergy and lay Catholics who “lack freedom of speech.”

With U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un trading insults and threatening war, California officials are taking the threat of nuclear exchange seriously.

Noting the heightened North Korean threat, the Los Angeles-area Joint Regional Intelligence Center issued a bulletin last month warning that a nuclear attack on Southern California would be “catastrophic” and urged officials in the region to shore up their nuclear attack response plans.

The report cites North Korea’s late July test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could, in theory, reach the West Coast of the United States. “North Korea’s propaganda videos feature ruins of San Francisco and Washington,” the document says.“North Korea’s propaganda videos feature ruins of San Francisco and Washington,” the document says.

The 16-page “Nuclear Attack Response Considerations” bulletin is dated Aug. 16 and marked for “official use only.” It was circulated last month to Los Angeles-area local, state, and federal agency personnel and also throughout the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies across the country.

The idea behind the unclassified report was to share planning and guidance with as wide a distribution as possible, according to two officials involved in responding to a nuclear strike and who received the bulletin. Many agencies are involved in responding to an attack and are often staffed with personnel without access to classified information.

Just as the United States redoubles its 16-year-old military effort in Afghanistan, counter-terrorism specialist are spotlighting a “code of conduct” issued by al-Qaida’s branch in the region that declares the jihadist movement’s commitment to cooperating with the Taliban and calls on Muslims everywhere to support the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”

Al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent, or AQIS, is the al-Qaida branch for Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, and as the new code of conduct indicates, also Afghanistan and Burma.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson

The AQIS document, which has received little attention since it was issued June 25, declares that targeting Americans and U.S. interests in Pakistan are its “foremost priority.”

In his August speech to the nation, President Trump announced a new strategy in Afghanistan that would include the deployment of more American troops and the continued training of Afghan forces, with the objective of convincing the Taliban it cannot win on the battlefield.

The al-Qaida document was the focal point of a panel at the recent World Summit on Counter-Terrorism, an annual gathering of counter-terrorism specialists hosted by the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel.

Former Department of Homeland Security counter-terrorism specialist Philip Haney, who attended the conference, pointed out that with more armed fighters pledging allegiance to the AQIS coalition, Taliban and ISIS forces have begun conducting joint operations against both civilians and the government-supported Afghan Local Police.

“This means that the conflict arena in Afghanistan will expand and that fighters from jihadist groups across the entire Indian subcontinent – not to mention from other Islamic countries that have been influenced by al-Qaida – will become involved in the AQIS-led jihad,” Haney said.

Haney noted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson specifically has laid out a strategy of compelling the Taliban to come to the negotiating table by countering their reasons for keeping up their fight.

The Trump administration also insists Pakistan must adopt a “different approach” to the conflict and play a central role in persuading the Taliban to come to the negotiating table, instead of supporting jihadist groups such as the Taliban and harboring known terrorists.

“With the emergence of AQIS, it seems less likely than ever that the Taliban will agree to abandon its goal of implementing Shariah law across Afghanistan and negotiate some kind of peace agreement with the current U.S.-backed government,” Haney said.

AQIS clearly hopes that the Taliban will be able to revive its state inside Afghanistan, warned Thomas Joscelyn, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the senior editor for FDD’s Long War Journal.

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is closer to that goal today than at any point since Sept. 11, 2001,” he wrote in an analysis of the AQIS code of conduct. “And it is a goal that AQIS is working towards.”

Coalition against ‘enemies of Shariah’

This year, some 1,200 counter-terror specialists in the academic, diplomatic, intelligence, law enforcement and military arenas from more than 30 countries attended the 17th summit in Israel, Sept. 11-14, under the theme of “The Terrorism Maze.”

At the summit, a panel of seven experts from India, Israel, the Netherlands, Pakistan and the U.K. led by ICT senior researcher Michael Barak discussed the emergence of the new coalition of Salafi Muslim groups in 2014 that is now known as AQIS.

Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri

The panelists emphasized that the central role Afghanistan and Pakistan play in both the global Islamic movement and in the international terror network has been largely overlooked by governments outside of the area and even by counter-terrorism specialists in the West, which is reflected in policy.

The AQIS code of conduct specifically authorizes attacks against American and Israeli civilians, and against the governments of the five countries in the subcontinent supporting the U.S., calling them “the enemies of Shariah” and the “global forces of infidelity.”

The document confirms a new transnational coalition of jihadist groups operating across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Burma have pledged loyalty to the strategic goals of both the original al-Qaida and to ISIS, which has morphed into a global coalition of at least 30 groups.

The “code of conduct” emphasizes the allegiance of al-Qaida members to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, and to the emir of the Taliban, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.

AQIS says its members are fighting “shoulder-to-shoulder” with the Taliban “mujahideen.”

The preamble states – establishing the legitimacy of engaging in war against those who reject Islam – it is “a manifest reality that one purpose of jihad is breaking the might of Kufr (infidelity) and establishing Shariah; while another one is guidance, protection, and welfare of the Muslims.”

“Both purposes are necessary and interdependent on each other. A lapse in moving towards one of the two objectives, makes advancing towards the other impossible,” the document states.

“Considering the current state of affairs, there is a need – more than ever – for a jihadi movement in this region of the world that advances forward without losing sight of either of these two objectives, while holding the two purposes equally important.”

AQIS says such a movement “would undoubtedly be a mercy and blessing for the Muslims of the Subcontinent; and would also result in turning this dark night of oppression and corruption into a bright morning of Shariah.”

“Hence, it is a religious obligation upon every mujahid and every jihadi organization to make the aforementioned objectives, the focus of all their jihadi activities.”

AQIS said it “invites the Muslims of the subcontinent to pledge their allegiance to the Islamic Emirate and to support it.”

Joscelyn noted the new code of conduct explains that AQIS fighters are integrated into the Taliban’s chain-of-command.

“The mujahideen associated with the Jama’ah [AQIS] … are present on the ground under the emirate’s flag, and are actively participating in battles against the enemies of sharia,” the text reads.

He said the integration explains why AQIS has produced only minimal propaganda from the battlefields in Afghanistan, even though it is clearly contributing to the fight.

Weighing the enemy’s assessment

AQIS says an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, signifying Western defeat, would be a boon for the jihadis’ cause throughout the Indian subcontinent.

“It is our conviction that the defeat of America and its agents would result in victory for the religious forces in this entire region,” says the document.

Joscelyn commented that while the war in Afghanistan “is America’s longest, and there are many reasons to be skeptical about the future of the country, the enemy’s assessment must be weighed when assessing military options going forward.”

“And AQIS thinks that an American defeat would be a clear victory for the jihadists, with effects that ripple throughout the neighboring countries.”